Mannequins at the Fashion V Sport exhibition. Courtesy V&A Museum

Exhibition review – Fashion V Sport at the V&A until January 4 2009.

Step onto any city street and you are guaranteed to see someone wearing a hooded top or tracksuit trousers. Fashion V Sport charts this evolution of sportswear into mainstream fashion, onto the couture runways and into our everyday lives.

The circular exhibition is divided into four themes – Dare, Display, Play and Desire.

Dare starts by illustrating how elite clothing can become subsumed into the mainstream. It is easy to forget for example that in the 1920s, only tennis star Rene Lacoste wore the Rene Lacoste polo shirt. American athletes had their windbreaker jacket commandeered by 1980's break-dancers who liked the slippery material, and such items have been mass-produced ever since.

Cassette Playa Spring Summer Collection 2008 at London Fashion Week. © Catwalking.com

The exhibits show that both fashion designers and sportswear manufacturers embraced this blurring of boundaries. The fashion world began to use performance-enhancing materials to improve comfort and durability.

Meanwhile sportswear began to utilise often retro fashion designs to enhance their products’ credibility with fashion-conscious buyers. One intriguing example of the latter is an Adidas outfit in dogstooth check, complete with Sherlock Holmes cape.

Display explains how sportswear has become so ubiquitous that wearers choose to express personality and affiliations in the way they tie their laces or wear their tracksuits. A video demonstrating trainer customisation highlights this. The mass-produced Adidas ‘lace jewellery’ seems however to negate the point of unique modifications.

Image - Variations on Sport in Vogue Italia April 2005. © Steve Hiett / D&V / trunkarchive.com

Sportswear moved into the mainstream, visitors are told, because it is comfortable and wearable. Play however moves further away from everyday practicality and into the realms of the fashionably bizarre.

Aitor Throup’s hooded tracksuit top, complete with elephant mask, comes from a collection entitled When Football Hooligans Become Hindu Gods. Christian Dior’s dance outfit combines 18th-century eveningwear (albeit in neon yellowy-green) with jersey warm-up trousers. Walter Van Beirendonck’s tracksuit top and bottoms, from his Stop Terrorising Our World collection, display anti-capitalist messages on typical tracksuit material.

These items are certainly high fashion but raise the question of whether they can still be considered sportswear.

Desire brings the circuit to an end, both physically and metaphorically. If Play shows how the relationship between fashion and sport can become extreme to the point of tenuousness, Desire demonstrates how it has been flipped.

Two boys with skateboards. © Vanessa Oguchi

Using sport to sell fashion is not a new phenomenon, and the viewer will probably be familiar with the David Beckham and Thierry Henry adverts on display. Fashion selling sport is less common.

A Chanel surfboard and Paul Smith skateboard show how high-end designers are embracing the public obsession with labels to expand their brands. At this point the function of sportswear becomes virtually redundant. Designers must keep evolving and expanding their repertoire to maintain any kind of exclusivity.

Japanese designer, Hirofumi Kiyonaga has taken this a step further, inventing a football team to design collections for. His collaboration with Nike to create FC Real Bristol has captured consumer imagination; FCRB appeared in Pro Evolution Soccer 5 alongside Arsenal and Manchester United.

Kish with his trainer collection. © Patricia Niven

The final exhibits show that individuality is not just a preoccupation of designers. Kish is a member of the public whose love of hip-hop and football has led him to amass more than 1,000 pairs of trainers.

There is no practical reason for Kish to own so many. Similarly, there would be no practical reason for an athlete to own a pair of diamond-encrusted trainer laces by End. It is the owning that matters.

The exhibition has a lot to say about the desire to remain exclusive. Luckily the V&A doesn’t restrict entry to the elite so take advantage and see Fashion V Sport for yourself.